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How did a small team in the east of the Netherlands (Groningen) from the Government Datacenter North (ODC-Noord) grow into a supplier of crucial building blocks for the Netherlands digital government strategy? Jaap Jansma, Manager of ODC-Noord, and Marcel Timmer, Country Director Netherlands at Red Hat, explain.
ODC-Noord implements, manages, and operates as a scalable, sovereign cloud service for the Dutch government, and Red Hat provides the fundamental open source software. Together, the 2 companies look at what’s needed to continue fulfilling this role within the government, ranging from scalability and digital sovereignty to security-rich AI development within the central government.
ODC-Noord was established in 2012 as part of the Compacte Rijksdienst (Compact Central Government) program, which aimed to reduce the number of central government datacenters from 65 to 4. In Groningen, a small team saw an opportunity to do this both more efficiently and in a way that prepares ODC-Noord for the future. Today, the result is much more than a technical platform. ODC-Noord forms an important foundation for the digital government and, consequently, public service delivery.
“At the time, we received a request from the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science (OCW) asking if we could deliver a platform for their application landscape,” says Jansma. “That was the moment to build a platform based on open source that we could offer not only to OCW, but also to other parties within the central government.”
